Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:
On Tue, 14 Nov 2006 20:55:18 -0500, DSK wrote:

basskisser wrote:
Are you going to tell me about your son being a "drafting
engineer"????
Is he a drafter (technician), or an engineer, or an engineer that
prefers to do his own drafting?


I know a number of draftsmen; I know a number of engineers
who can also do their own drafting, and some who are
incompetent with AutoCAD and insist it's the computer's fault.

Generally good engineers are proficient with a tool like
AutoCAD. But then, some engineers can't use a wrench, either.

This was years ago, but the draftsmen/women at Heald Machine Tool were
all "drafting engineers" and occasionally recognized errors that the
design engineers made. they also did the revisions and revision
calculations for machine tooling.

A good draftsman will find errors that engineers make, simply because
there are sometimes fit problems that the engineer doesn't recognize if
he's not doing the drafting.

I don't know if that enters into this discussion, but that's what they
were called.

I've been in the engineering business quite a long time, never heard of
one. Were they PE's or Techs?

I'm not sure what you mean by PE - as in Professional Engineer as in
certified and licenses as Professional Engineers? If so, then no -
PE's weren't required as part of the design process.

A lot of the drafting engineers had four year engineering degrees with
a smattering of two year Associate degrees. The way it worked was if
a particular machine needed a mod or design change for what ever
reason, usually it was run by a design engineer or other design type
who ran the numbers, drew out some simple designs or mods, then it
went to the drafting department who did most of the detail work.

And I'm not exactly sure exactly why that means anything anyway. I've
worked with a lot of engineers over my professional career that had
two year drafting degrees but were still very good engineers.

Sometimes we are over enamored with education when long time practical
experience can substitute. Some PE's I've worked with are dumber
than rocks and some drafting personnel worth their weight in gold.


In our business, a registered PE was required to review the specifications
and approve the resultant engineering design when the product required a
"stamp".

Degreed engineers .... mechanical, electrical and software ... had at least
a BSME or BSEE. I've lost track of the newer degrees in the software
areas.

Non-degreed draftspeople were typically referred to as "design engineers"
although they usually did not have an engineering degree.

When big, central CAD systems first started to become popular, replacing the
drafting tables and lead pencils, a group of people emerged that were
referred to as "CAD operators". These people were basically prima donnas
who drove the degreed but computer illiterate engineers crazy because nobody
knew what they were doing.

In time as PCs became more powerful and programs like AutoCad and solid
modeling software became available that would run on PCs, the big central
host CAD systems disappeared, replaced with networked PCs. Now-a-days at my
old company, the engineers typically produce their own drawings and the "CAD
operator" no longer is required.

One thing still drives me .. and others ...crazy though .... particularly
with mechanical engineers. For some reason, many have an "invented here"
philosophy and refuse to re-use time proven designs. This results in labor
cost overruns and usually a new, unproven brain fart for a mechanism or
something that has already been proven not to work.

The electrical guys aren't as bad.

Eisboch